~ After 50 years, clearly gaming is lifelong

Dragons and Rhinos

Tezcatlipocca : Played for awhile and found myself finished with the Riliss quest series. But not before finding the floating island pulled by two dragons !

I hadn’t seen anything so impressive in the game world for a long time. Although, the last quest reward was something I really wanted :

Wow ! It looks awesome and runs fast. Nice rhino.

I believe I have an actual mount I will use, finally. After coming back I find myself with three mounts in quick succession, and previously I had played for years without ever getting one due to the high costs involved.

Next I attempted to finish a last Fens quest, and discovered it required a faction grind up to 30,000 points. Not being excited about doing a repeateable quest over and over to make that happen (From 6500 to 30000 ?), I gave up and moved on to the Kunzar Jungle. Here, I apparently have a quest series to complete within the city of Jinisk, and got started on it before logging.

Then I moved on to Star Trek. Hammer is now level 4 after doing some more tutorial quests and getting used to the galaxy map once again. I have three crewmembers, and a half-memory that I should not train them all but instead train one or two. I haven’t been able to use the science officer much so she’s not getting any love. I keep getting captain and officer points. They seem to modify mostly skills and abilities which I don’t have, and am not sure how to get.

Apparently, a bug/feature of free to play like this is, just jump in and fumble around for awhile. Game rules ? You don’t need to know what those are. Like the monetary systems, these are confusing. I see four types of currency in place :

Cryptic points. These are familiar – spend real life monies to acquire them. While it’s not exact, I’m mentally thinking 2 points = 1 cent. I can spend them on costume pieces for my characters and probably more.

Energy Credits. These are what I get for selling item loot. I believe the Exchange (Broker) is denominated in these.

Gold-Pressed Latinum. No idea what this is, and no guesses either.

Dilithium. Seems I am allowed to refine 8,000 of this a day, but since I have no ore to refine, I won’t be doing so. Sounds like something related to crafting.

So I kept fumbling around for awhile, and ended up in the crafting system. Those anomalies that yield little items are apparently EQ2’s harvest nodes. I got introduced to these and completed three quests from Ferengi brothers to introduce me to some diplomatic system.

While the combat is fun, the atmosphere fun, and it’s an all around enjoyable experience, the questing system is pretty lacking. EQ2 has hands down the best questing system I’ve seen. Star Trek has some nice features but the quest window, for instance, stinks.

I try to see what I’m supposed to do as the next step in the quest. The NPC wants me to examine his inventory. I got a message which I subsequently forgot what it said, and had no way to figure out they were “The boxes behind Rok in Memory Alpha” other then dropping and restarting the quest. Oops.

On the other hand, there are apparently quests offered inside the quest window. There’s a neat innovation. There’s the familiar PvP queue, and something called a PvE queue. There’s a good idea I’ll have to check out. And the quest text is well laid out for the backstory and preserved pretty well. What they forget to preserve is apparently the next quest step.

Late in the night I acquired a quest to get a snack from the Deep Space 9 station. It sounds like they’re trying to lead you somewhere for some purpose so I started moving in that direction; but I’m lost. It seems you can’t get there from Sirius block. Well, I can figure that out next session hopefully.